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Mobile at 150 Mbit/s and 15 ms: who owes it, and who measures it

7 min read

Houses on a ridge at the edge of a valley in fog, with poles and line pylons vanishing into the white
A coverage percentage describes a region. Your site is a point, and it sits where it sits.

One of your sites has no fibre and will not have any soon: connectivity arrives over the air, and in the coming months you must decide whether that radio link stays the only one. Since late July three figures have been circulating — 150 Mbit/s downlink, 30 uplink, 15 milliseconds of latency — and they look like the end of the argument. The figures are real and they sit in a public act. They are not owed to your site, and the method by which they will be verified is, by explicit provision, not available to you.

What was adopted, and what is still a proposal

On 29 July 2026 the Council of AGCOM, the Italian communications authority, adopted decision no. 199/26/CONS, published on 3 August. The adopted act does one thing: it opens a public consultation on the framework for renewing, until 31 December 2037, the rights of use of mobile spectrum in the 800, 900, 1500, 1800, 2100, 2600 and 3400-3600 MHz bands, and for extending to the same date the WLL rights in the 28 GHz band, the ones a share of FWA runs on. Responses are due by 5 October 2026.

The figures are not in the decision: they are in Annex A, which the decision calls «parte integrante», an integral part, and which remains a consultation document. It carries the draft of the final measure, article by article — and whoever writes network specifications has no reason to wait for it to become final.

The three figures, and the two definitions that make them figures

Draft article 5 puts on every operator granted renewal, by 31 December 2031 (Milestone 1), an effective data rate of at least 30 Mbit/s downlink available over at least 95% of Italian territory. Also by 2031, 150 Mbit/s downlink, 30 uplink and RTT no higher than 15 ms for at least 75% of the population of each Italian region; then 85% by 2033 and 95% by 2035.

The point is not the figures: it is the two definitions in draft article 1. Effective data rate means «95esimo percentile della distribuzione del throughput d’utente, misurato in tipiche condizioni di picco del traffico» — the 95th percentile of the user throughput distribution, measured under typical peak traffic conditions. And the delay is the 95th percentile of the time a packet takes from the user terminal, across the mobile access network, to the first node coinciding with the termination point of the 5G data plane able to deliver the requested service, and back again.

Three things sit in those lines: a percentile, a load condition, a termination point. A specification that writes latency below 15 ms and stops there has written none of them.

That 95% belongs to a region, not to your site

The obligations are aggregates, and the aggregate is the region. Ninety-five per cent of a region’s population by 2035 leaves out a 5% that no obligation names. The sub-quotas show where attention goes: the population obligations must include at least 50%, 70% and 90% of provincial capitals, of municipalities under 5,000 inhabitants with high tourist density, and of the pixels the latest Infratel mapping does not find covered at 30 Mbit/s downlink. Those pixels have a size: the annex cites the 2024 mapping to say that some 1.08% of the resident population, «corrispondente a circa 636.000 abitanti» — about 636,000 inhabitants — and roughly 16% of the territory are, in 2026, below that threshold, and it says so «in base ai piani di copertura dichiarati dagli stessi operatori radiomobili»: on the basis of the coverage plans declared by the mobile operators themselves. Declared, not measured: the same distinction anyone selling connectivity meets every month on the coverage map.

Then the collective obligations: by 2035, the same 150/30 and 15 ms over 95% of motorways, high-speed lines and TEN-T corridors, 90% of port and airport grounds, 80% of inland waterways in those corridors, 95% of every metro line. That last one carries a date which concerns the landowner more than the operators: the duty to build passive and active infrastructure applies to lines for which, as at 1 January 2030, no coverage project along the whole line is already under way. Start your own project before that date and you pay for it.

None of these thresholds is a commitment to an address. A warehouse, a hospital, a remote telecontrol cabinet appear in none of the percentages.

Who measures, and with which instruments

Verification is ex post, through field measurement campaigns, at least yearly from 2030, static and dynamic, with statistical coverage of the whole country, rotating over several years. «Le campagne di misura sul campo non sono concordate con gli operatori»: field measurement campaigns are not agreed with the operators. Per-operator results are published within 60 days of each campaign. Methods and instruments are approved by the Ministry of Enterprise and Made in Italy by decree, at least six months before renewal starts: set at 1 January 2030, it is due by mid-2029.

Then the line that shuts the door: those instruments «sono da considerare strumento di ausilio all’Amministrazione che esegue i controlli e non come strumento a disposizione del singolo utente, anche aziendale» — an aid to the administration carrying out the checks, not a tool available to the individual user, including a business user.

In plain terms: the measurement that counts is the Ministry’s, on a national statistical basis, and it is not the one you can invoke in your contract. If you want those figures at your site, you measure them yourself.

What to write in the specification

The strongest argument is the Authority’s own, in a note explaining why it imposed no generic duty to build 5G Stand Alone architectures: without measurable KPIs, the networks built by operators would be technically advanced, formally meeting the obligation, yet might be unable to guarantee end users the performance required.

A specification behaves the same way. A clause asking for 5G connectivity or a backup FWA terminal is discharged with an active SIM. The entries to add are those of draft article 1: a stated percentile rather than an average, a load condition (busy hour, not the dead of night), the termination point of the measurement, the number of samples, who holds the instrument and who signs the record. For the fibre carrying traffic to the radio site, acceptance testing stays what it always was, with the known limits of a photograph taken before the customer exists.

One line for industry: the draft forbids trading and leasing in favour of parties using the spectrum for private networks and services. A private network on these bands goes through an agreement with the operator.

What we do not know

We do not know whether the figures will hold: contributions run to 5 October, and the final measure will be a different act from the one published on 3 August. We do not know how one ambiguity in the definitions will be settled: for delay the 95th percentile is the prudent reading, while a guaranteed minimum throughput is usually expressed with the complementary percentile; the decree on measurement methods will say which convention applies. We do not know whether the timetable for renewal applications, which the draft places «possibilmente entro il 30 giugno 2027» — by 30 June 2027 if possible — will hold, nor anything about individual build plans: the first plans with annual steps reach the Ministry twelve months after authorisation.

Our work here is of two kinds. First: turning those three figures into clauses somebody can dispute — percentile, busy hour, termination point, samples, signed record — then running the measurement at acceptance, on the real site, handing the report over with the work, on the radio as much as on the fibre feeding it. Second: making sure those measurements do not end up in a folder. Traces, as-built records, test reports and alarms from every site become a single map of the network, on which an AI does the diagnosis and a crew closes the fault: when a link drops below threshold you know before the user does. Where needed, the AI runs inside the client’s perimeter, on-premise or in a dedicated cloud with data centres in Italy, together with CSIDIA, the other company in the group. Our own crews, no subcontracting.

If you have sites that depend on a radio link and the contract carries nothing but an acronym, write to us: we will write the threshold and measure it.

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